Former Interior secretary blasts gas industry pressurehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/former-interior-secretary-blasts-gas-industry-pressure
Former Interior Department Secretary Bruce Babbitt visited the University of Colorado recently to talk about oil and gas drilling on federal public lands. Not surprisingly, he didn’t pull any punches.

Babbitt criticized the agency he oversaw during the Clinton years, the Bureau of Land Management, for its handling of drilling on 250 million acres of land and 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, all of which it manages for American taxpayers. Agency decisions about drilling are “dictated by the oil and gas industry,” he said bluntly. Instead of protecting the public’s interest, the agency’s culture and structure facilitate industry profits at the expense of recreation, conservation and natural values.

Babbitt’s comments made me think about the gas industry’s threat to Colorado cities like Longmont or to small towns where local attempts to safeguard areas from drilling can get easily overwhelmed by industry influence. If a federal agency with a $1 billion-plus annual budget and 10,000 employees is “completely outgunned and outmatched” by the oil and gas industry, as Babbitt put it, imagine the industry’s power to dictate what happens at the state level.

Case in point: Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper’s decision to join the Colorado Oil and Gas Association in its lawsuit against Longmont, which has decided to exercise its right to control drilling at the local level.

Longmont voters saw fit two years ago to enact protections to keep oil and gas out of city limits, despite industry sinking a half-million dollars into defeating the measure. Since then, four other cities have followed suit. And this fall, Coloradans could see a statewide ballot measure that would give cities and towns full authority to decide for themselves whether energy development should be allowed within their borders.

The industry is pulling out all the stops to make sure its power isn’t usurped again. Oil and gas boosters with the Orwellian moniker of Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development (CRED) have already purchased more than $2 million in ads and have $2 million more in the bank to tell us how safe and normal fracking is. Turn on the TV at night or the radio in your car on the way to work. You can’t miss them. And that’s before we even know for sure if there will be a ballot measure.

Industry, with aid from plenty of well-oiled politicians, will almost certainly try to make this into a “War on Fracking” that has no basis in reality. I’m like a lot of Coloradans; I drive a car, heat my home with gas and am otherwise an active participant in the fossil-fuel economy. But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to step aside and let companies call the shots every step of the way on when, where and how they drill.

The stakes are far too high. Colorado’s iconic alpine, prairie and plateau landscapes are an economic engine, with consumer spending on outdoor recreation topping $13 billion a year and generating just shy of $1 billion in state and local sales taxes. Altogether, they support 124,000 jobs ––14,000 more than the oil and gas industry.

At the local level, places like Longmont are feeling the effects of drilling inching up and into neighborhoods, where real estate agents are reporting a chilling effect on home sales. Academic research has found a correlation between decreased home values and oil and gas development in drilling hot spots like Colorado, Pennsylvania and Texas.

But it doesn’t take statistics to understand that round-the-clock drilling, thousands of truck trips, industrial noise, drums full of toxic chemicals, noxious fumes, flaring wells, and waste pits and pipelines that accidentally spill don’t belong next to homes, parks, schools and playgrounds.

Longmont voters knew this two years ago. Now, some in the banking and insurance industries understand it, too. Increasingly, mortgage lenders are creating policies that don’t allow property owners to lease their land for drilling. Insurers are denying coverage where fracking is taking place. One couple in Pennsylvania was denied a refinance on their home simply because it was on land next to a drilling site.

That’s not right, especially considering that more than 15 million Americans now live within one mile of a fracking site. There is no rational reason for the value of minerals under the ground to trump the value of what happens above the ground. Think conservation values, such as an area’s water supply and recreational opportunities from hiking to biking and home prices. And then there’s the value of knowing we’re not breathing in toxic chemicals and that our peace of mind and quality of life aren’t being sacrificed to pad an oil or gas company’s bottom line.

Whether we’re talking about BLM oversight of millions of acres of public land or individual Colorado communities fighting for the right to make their own rules, what’s missing is a level playing field. Industry calls the shots and government lets it.

We deserve smarter planning and a better balance in managing industrial activity that has the potential for harming what makes Colorado so wonderful. We need to put public interest, public values and public involvement on equal ground with energy development. That’s why it was heartening to hear a former Interior secretary support changing a system that has turned into a government-sanctioned drilling onslaught.

Eric Frankowski is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He is senior program director at Resource Media, a nonprofit media strategy firm, and a former city editor at the Longmont Times-Call in Colorado.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryWriters on the Range2014/04/10 09:10:37 GMT-6ArticleGas industry secrets and a nurse's storyhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/gas-industry-secrets-and-a-nurses-story
Eric Frankowski describes the medical ordeal of a Durango emergency room nurse who was accidentally exposed to the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing.This July, an emergency room nurse named Cathy Behr wanted to tell Colorado's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission the story of how she nearly died after being exposed to a mystery chemical from a gas-patch accident.

Regulators said she wasn't scheduled to testify and they didn't want to hear it. But anyone concerned about natural gas development should listen.

Behr, who works in southern Colorado, at Durango's Mercy Regional Medical Center, fell ill last April after being exposed for 10 minutes to a gas-field worker who had come into the ER, his clothes damp and reeking. He'd come into contact with one of the "secret formulas" drillers use to hydraulically fracture oil- and gas-bearing formations.

Within minutes of inhaling the nauseating fumes coming off the worker, Behr lost her sense of smell. (She later told her story to the Durango Herald, a daily paper that has done excellent reporting on the incident: durangoherald.com.) The ER was locked down and the room ventilated by firefighters. But when Behr went home after her 12-hour shift, she still couldn't smell anything. Then the headache she'd developed got worse. A week later, her liver, heart and lungs began to shut down. She spent 30 hours in intensive care.

Although the company that makes the frac'ing fluid provided Behr's doctors with what it calls "'Material Data Safety Sheets"' at the time of the incident, it refused to provide more specific information to the hospital once she fell ill, according to the Herald. Her intensive-care doctor had to guess what to do as he tried to keep her alive.

Among a suite of long-overdue reforms, the state's oil and gas commission is now considering rules that would require the oil and gas industry to tell the public what's in the toxic brew it uses for so-called frac'ing operations. Compounds commonly injected into the ground include benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene and a fracing formula called hydrocarbon methanol phosphate ester, which Behr's doctor suspects is what poisoned her.

Small quantities of these chemicals have the potential to contaminate entire aquifers. Drillers can pump upward of 100,000 gallons of this frac juice -- per well -- into the ground.

These chemicals were exempted from the federal Safe Water Drinking Act as part of the 2005 energy bill, despite their toxicity and potential for release into groundwater. Thanks to intense lobbying from the oil and gas lobby, companies aren't required to tell anyone what they inject, in what concentrations, or how much of it they pump into the ground.

Halliburton has said that having to identify its frac'ing ingredients would mean giving away trade secrets, much like requiring Coca-Cola to reveal its secret for Coke. Here's a thought: Coke does tell consumers what's in every can of its soft drinks, even if it doesn't reveal the exact recipe. And last time I checked, spilling some on your lap won't bring on heart, liver and respiratory failure.

It would be bad enough if Behr's story were the only one. It's not.

Earlier this year, an outfitter who drank from a contaminated spring behind his cabin near the drilling-besieged Roan Plateau fell ill and needed medical help. His diagnosis: benzene exposure.

The oil and gas commission did get to hear about that incident. When asked about the effects of ingesting benzene, however, a toxicologist for the industry group, the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, told commissioners that some level of "'acute health effect,"' as long as it was reversible, would be acceptable. According to a draft transcript of the hearing, the expert said unless it causes cancer, benzene could be considered simply a nuisance, like dust from construction.

"'It may make me cough every once in a while, and two days later I'm better,"' he said. "'Is that a significant health effect or is that a nuisance effect?"'

The commission's staff has proposed a new rule that would require companies to tell the state what chemicals it injects into the ground to drill a well. La Plata County, where Cathy Behr got sick, supports that change and wants stronger protections for gas field workers as well. County Commissioner Wally White also worries about the future: "In 10, 15, 20 years, will we have a Love Canal Here... will these environmental things come back to bite us? Nobody knows."

Meanwhile, Behr has mostly recovered, though she has trouble breathing at high altitude. The fate of the worker doused with the frac'ing product -- later revealed to be something called "ZetaFlow" -- was only recently revealed. His name is Clinton Marshall, and he says he suffered no ill effects from the frac'ing spill and wanted the Durango Herald to hear his side of the story. Marshall also said that though his employer fired him after the accident, he has a new job with the gas industry in Farmington, N.M.

Eric Frankowski is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). A former reporter for the Longmont Times-Call, he is now a media consultant in Boulder, Colorado.